Canapés, sofas and curtains

The other day I discovered that one French word for sofa is canapé (/kanape/), and that canapé-lit or canapé transformable/convertible is a sofa bed. The word sofa is also used in French, and canapé can also mean an open sandwich.

According to the OED, in English canapé (/ˈkænəpɪ/) can mean both “A piece of bread or toast, etc., on which small savouries are served.” and “A sofa”. I’ve never come across it used to mean sofa in English, and had always assumed that canapés were small items of food similar to tapas. I think such things are also known as appetisers or hors d’oeuvres.

Canapé comes from the Medieval Latin canāpēum, from canōpēum (mosquito curtains; pavilion, tent, bed), from the Latin cōnōpēum (seat with a baldaquin*), from the Ancient Greek κωνωπεῖον (kōnōpeion – an Egyptian bed or couch with mosquito curtains), from κάνωψ (kánōs – gnat, mosquito). In English the word came to mean mainly curtain or canopy, which comes from the same root, while in French and other Romance languages its primary meaning became sofa or couch.

Sofa /ˈsəʊfə/ probably arrived via the Turkish sofa from the Arabic صفة (súffa – a long seat made of stone or brick).

Settee /sɛˈtiː/ is probably a variant of settle /ˈsɛt(ə)l/, “a long bench, often with a high back and arms, with storage space underneath for linen.” [source]. Settle comes from the Old English setl, from the Germanic *setlo-, from the pre-Germanic *sedlo-, from the Proto-Indo-European *sed-lo-, from *sed- (to sit).

Couch /kaʊtʃ/ comes from the French couche, from the Old French culche, which is cognate with coucher (to sleep), which comes from the Latin collocāre (to lay in its place, lay aright, lodge) from com- (together) and locāre (to place).

*Baldaquin /ˈbældəkɪn/ = “A structure in the form of a canopy, either supported on columns, suspended from the roof, or projecting from the wall, placed above an altar, throne, or door-way”.

What do you call your a long padded seat designed for two or more people? If it can be converted into a bed, what do you call it?

For my parents such a piece of furniture is a settee, and I used to use this name as well. Now I usually call it a sofa. We also have a piece of furniture that came from my grandparents and that we call a settle – a long wooden seat with a high, straight wooden back, wooden arms and a narrow seat with a cushion on top. The seat also lifts up and we store board games inside.

In Canada we sometimes call them “chesterfields”. It was much more common in my childhood – using that word immediately evokes memories of my parents’ old grey chesterfield. Nowadays it is mostly couch.

If you are English Kate Fox links what you call your “long padded seat designed for two or more people” to class. She reckons you can tell what class someone is by the term they use – though the whole system has been somewhat corrupted by the Amercan ‘sofa’.

Couch/sofa is the primary term for me (western US), but one for exactly two people is also called a loveseat. One that folds out into a bed can be called a hideabed, or a sofa bed, but also just a couch that folds out into a bed.

If it has one big mattresslike cushion that is easy to pull out of the frame, and it also transforms into a bed, it can also be a futon.

I don’t know about the possiblities of Occitan ‘sèti’ but until I read wikipedia’s entry for settee I didn’t ever know that settee was also a kind of small Mediterranean boat?
I know that the humorously pronounced in English ‘banquette’ (bonk’et) a long upholstered bench placed against or built into a wall is from French via Provençal ‘banqueta’ diminutive of ‘banca’ bench of Germanic origin.
I had a look in which languages canapé exists as in the French sense:
French canapé
Breton kanape
Bulgarian канапе
Greek καναπες
Hungarian kanapé
Ladin canapè
Ligurian canapé
Luxembourgian Canapé
Polish kanape
Provençal canapè
Romanian canapea
Trentino canapè
Turkish kanepe

Pearl – I wondered where the open sandwich meaning came from as well and couldn’t find any information about that. Maybe at some point in the past people got into the habit of eating open sandwiches while reclining on their canapés/sofas, and the word canapé came to associated with such sandwiches.

The Trésor de la langue française informatisé simply says that the culinary meaning came about from a resemblance in shape. In other words, the (edible) canapé is essentially the rectangular slice of toasted or fried bread bearing the delicacy in question — just as tapa (lid) originally referred directly to the cover on your drink, on which barmen wanting to encourage further drinking would place salty snacks.